0.2) The Undead

...I will tell a history of everything in five rebirths. Because I was there for the whole thing.

Brahma surfing snakes in the cosmic ocean (via)

Before I was born for the first time I was really, really dead. So dead I was undead. Beyond even the possibility of living or dying. The Rig Veda explains that unexplainable time before the Big Bang best. As the Hymn Of Creation goes:

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Non-being then existed not, nor being:
There was no air, nor sky that is beyond it.
What was concealed? Wherein? In whose protection?
And was there deep unfathomable water?

Death then existed not, nor life immortal
Of neither night nor day was any token.

Without any Earth to turn, there was no night or day. Without any sun to spin around, there were no years. As Einstein said in his paper on special relativity:

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If we wish to describe the motion of a material point, we give the values of its co-ordinates as functions of the time. Now we must bear carefully in mind that a mathematical description of this kind has no physical meaning unless we are quite clear as to what we understand by “time.” We have to take into account that all our judgments in which time plays a part are always judgments of simultaneous events. If, for instance, I say, “That train arrives here at 7 o'clock,” I mean something like this: “The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.”

Our sense of time is just a token. The spinning of a watch, the turning of a planet. Before spacetime exploded onto the scene, however, "of neither night nor day was any token."

For a brief moment just before the Big Bang, you and I and every single piece of matter and energy was crushed together nowhere, but before that, who the fuck knows? As the Vedas continue:

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Who knows for certain? Who shall here declare it?
Whence was it born, and whence came this creation?
The gods were born after this world's creation:
Then who can know from whence it has arisen?

None knoweth where creation has arisen;
And whether he has or has not produced it:

Einstein's physics let scientists create Brahmastras, world destroying weapons, but brought us no closer to understanding than the ancients. The fact is that the time before time is unknowable, to gods and mortals alike. We were all created around the basic assumption of spacetime. Once you question that, you make an ass out of you and me. Yet this is where we spent most of our time. In what the Bible calls 'darkness upon the face of the deep'.

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In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void;
and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, and it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.

This is eerily parallel to the Vedic hymn, which goes:

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Darkness there was at first by darkness hidden;
Without distinctive marks, this all was water.
That which, becoming, by the void was covered,
That One by force of heat came into being.

'Darkness by darkness hidden', 'darkness upon the face of the deep.' Then light, heat, and the universe emerges. Basically what happens. The Bible captures the dualistic nature of reality when 'God divided the light from the darkness.' Something about spacetime divides the world up into light and dark, here and there, dead and alive.

Yet spacetime is a creation. What happened before creation? With all the telescopes, with all the isotopes, it's still a mystery. And I like it that way. It's sublime. This is the terror and thrill of living, that we are surrounded with the unknown. Unknowing is the highest wisdom of the sage. As the Daodejing says, "To know that one does not know is best; Not to know but to believe that one knows is a disease."

For all of the time before time, in all of the space before space, I was unknowable. Before I was born a single time I was undead. So let me eat your brains.

November 10th, 2022. Tagged My Book